President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is planning to nominate political commentator and economic analyst Larry Kudlow to chair the Council of Economic Advisers.

Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who advised Trump’s presidential campaign, said at a luncheon in Michigan that Trump was set to choose Kudlow to be next chair of the council, a source who was in attendance told Business Insider.

In a follow-up conversation with Business Insider, Moore clarified that Kudlow is the leading candidate for the job but was not selected yet. Moore also said the selection would come in “the next week or so.”

“He’s a fantastic pick for the role, a great pick,” Moore told Business Insider.

Kudos to Donald Trump for reaching out to someone who’s been willing to criticize Trump on occasion:

It will be interesting to see how influential Larry Kudlow will be. Normally I might prefer a traditional academic in the Mankiw/Hubbard vein, but in this case I think Kudlow is a very good pick. I see a looming fight between populism and supply-side economics, and Kudlow will ably defend the supply-side view. Kudlow will speak Trump’s language more effectively than a pure academic would. (Academics don’t like Trump, and I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual.)

I view myself as a moderate supply-sider, sort of like Miles Kimball. Even though I think some supply-siders are a bit too optimistic about the growth impact of tax cuts, at least Kudlow will be fighting for the right causes.

I know what you are all thinking; who will Kudlow recommend as Yellen’s replacement? It just so happens that Kudlow mentioned 5 names a few years back:

Kevin Warsh, John Taylor, Steve Forbes, Paul Ryan and Richard Fisher.

I’d guess that Warsh and Taylor are the more likely choices.

PS. Actually Kudlow mentioned 6 names, but the last person has spent the past 12 months using his blog to relentlessly attack Trump in a total unhinged manner. At this point he has more chance of becoming the next Pope than the next Fed chair.

Amazing what you can do with Photoshop.

PPS. Morgan Warstler mentioned that Kudlow is a fan of NGDPLT, and also Morgan’s proposed replacement of the welfare system

Steve, I’d have zero chance, and I’d turn down the job if offered. I do appreciate the vote of confidence, but there’s a huge difference between the world of blogging and the real world.

And this is not false modesty on my part, the role calls for many skills that I don’t have.

On the other hand I do think NGDP targeting has a decent chance–not right now, but within a couple decades. I really do see that as the wave of the future. If I ever have any influence, I hope it’s through ideas, not government jobs that I’m unqualified for.

Being consistently and seriously wrong and not learning from experience are not good qualities in an economic advisor.

Govt might have a role in preventing financial collapses. Consider the relationship between deregulation and the S&L crisis and the more recent financial crisis. Predicting and bailing out are something else.

Scott Sumner: if minimal qualifications are required to become president of the United States (see Trump, Bush jr, even Obama, when he started) why are you concerned you do not have the qualifications to be merely the Fed Chief?

Your only weakness is the modern-day orthodox macroeconomist inclination to retreat in the face of 2% inflation.

A few kicks in the butt from a Kudlow-Trump duo seeking re-election would fix that.

Trump is going to invite Scott to dinner. He’s going to say that Larry [Kudlow] told him about targeting GDP, and he wants to hear more about it. Trump loves Scott’s idea of describing inflation as “boosting workers’ wages,” and tells Scott that he would have had a great career in real estate sales.

As they order dessert, Trump finally broaches the possibility of Scott heading up the Fed, since he seems to be the guy everyone says is on top of this whole “targeting GDP” thing. As the lust for power causes Scott’s eyes to water, Trump says, “GET THE HELL OUT.”

In the cab to the airport, Scott remembers–only too late–that he once blogged, “Trump was just toying with Romney, publicly humiliating him for his earlier harsh criticism of Trump.”

Jokes aside, there’s a big difference between the kind of thing Romney did and the kind Scott has done. Scott’s not in the spotlight the way Romney was; Trump would likely have no problems with Scott. In fact, it would probably be even be better that Scott opposed Trump since Trump playing nice with him would look reasonable from Trump after the media investigates Scott’s anti-Trump history.

Good question, and one could argue there is no way to train for the Presidency, and there is no set of qualifications to be President. The job is too wide-ranging, and calls for many different character and personality traits, which change from era to era.

If experience is a qualification, then Hillary Clinton was certainly qualified, and in spades. She was not my cup of tea.

Bush jr. and Obama, for example, entered office clueless about monetary policy, which is (mostly) the topic of this blog. After eight years in office each, Bush jr and Obama still seemed clueless.

Clinton was a very successful President, but was the governor of a state even smaller than Texas (by the way, Texas has a weak-governor set-up). My guess is Clinton was lucky on monetary policy, although he was a bit of a policy-wonk and maybe understood the topic.

I do like Trump’s business experience, and perhaps even his reality TV show experience will be valuable in some settings. This is America, after all.

Trump even seems willing to hire “strong” people, such as Rex Tillerson, and I hope then delegate authority, something of a Reagan trait. That can get a President into trouble, when the minions start running the show (as Reagan found out). But I think a President has to select strong people and hope for the best.

We will see on Trump. He is the most fascinating character on the U.S. political scene, maybe ever.

I often wonder if Bush r. was really working for the Saudi monarchy. I hope we do not have to wonder if Trump is doing Putin’s bidding.

Sumner drawing attention to himself by saying he is modest (after Photoshopping something to look like he is a Fed chair pick). But he’s right about realizing his limitations. The biggest limitation for most of you readers is to realize monetarism doesn’t matter, doesn’t work (money is largely short and long term neutral).

@Christian List – I could not find the quote you mention, I assume you made it up?

@Kevin Erdmann who says: “So apparently one of the big knocks against Kudlow is that he is one of a few people who were willing to say in 2005 that a housing bust was not inevitable” -so the crash of the dot.com stock market bubble of 2000 was also not inevitable? As was the Mississippi crash of John Law, as was the popping of the UK South Seas bubble, as was the Tulip Mania demise, as was… trees grow to the sky says Erdmann, just print more money and all is well, no crash. Dream on. Like the Marxists, you monetarists live in a pseudo-scientific fantasy world.

BTW Steve Forbes, who is pro gold standard, would make a strong Fed chair (out of pure 24k gold! Contradiction?). While I do believe in money neutrality and hence don’t believe going on gold is anything special, being on a gold standard does have the benefit of cutting down on volatility, which some people find upsetting. Hence it’s a good anchor for prices (which btw are not that sticky).

If it helps, I think you have little chance of being Fed Chair, or ever being on the FOMC, despite my preference. That said, if ever there was a chance of an outsider being chosen for the FOMC, this is probably it. So many odd things have happened lately, that I wouldn’t bet against it. It doesn’t hurt that the guy who will reportedly be the CEA chairman likes you.

No, the forensics investigation was conducted by two forensic professional teams, in two different disciplines, on two different continents, independently from one another. One was in Europe: Italy, called Forlabs, who if you are not knowledgable about this industry are so reliable and credible that law enforcement agencies all across Europe, including the courts, rely upon their expertise. They train law enforcement. Every one of their associates are PhDs. The second was Reed Hayes, a court qualified document examiner with 40 years experience, board member of the Scientific Association of Forensic Examiners, Obama supporter by the way, and is based in in NA: Hawaii.

These are not tinfoil hat wearing youtubers, or rednecks out in the sticks. These are world renowned experts in their fields.

They independently arrived at the same conclusion that the document is a forgery. They spent 5 years in their investigations. Their task was to DISPROVE the forgery hypothesis. They each concluded that the document was pieced together using another birth certificate.

Sorry Art and Tom, but this is not about Arpeio. This is about the EVIDENCE.

And there is more coming…

You are seriously underestimating the ramifications of these events. You are experiencing a typical reaction common among the believers. At first there is denial. Always denial.

I don’t. I see Trump adopting traditional Republican economics, including tax cuts heavily tilted towards the best off, reducing government benefits for the rest, including Medicare and Social Security and privatization and other goodies for the best off. This may not be what his supporters expected, but seems where he’s going based on his words and appointments.

“Remember that these people must be confirmed by the Senate.”

I don’t see a Republican Senate disagreeing with Trump and I don’t see them allowing filibusters of appointments.

I’m impressed by your deviousness. You had me completely convinced that you wanted to see Trump stopped. But now I see that you were just throwing people off the scent while you were plotting with Trump, Kudlow, Putin and Assange to destroy the American economy by flooding it with money using the ruse of NGDPLT markets. And the masterstroke was hiring Ray Lopez to troll your blog to convince everyone you were just a minor figure who had been discredited by the major thought leaders in the industry.

NYT May 4, 1988 – Published: May 4, 1988. WASHINGTON, May 3—President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, are both deeply interested in astrology, the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, said today, and two former White House officials said Mrs.Reagan’s concerns had influenced the scheduling of important events.

but the last person has spent the past 12 months using his blog to relentlessly attack Trump in a total unhinged manner.
…
Hard to believe there are people taking seriously the idea of me as Fed chair.

I told you a few weeks ago that you should try to get in contact with Trump and that he might actually listen to you. But no you had to get Trump Derangement Syndrome and follow your superstition. Nevertheless he might still listen to you.

@Carl 16. December 2016 at 16:08 – “And the masterstroke was hiring Ray Lopez to troll your blog to convince everyone you were just a minor figure who had been discredited by the major thought leaders in the industry.” – yes, and having just watched Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, with all its plot twists, it’s entirely believable!

Sorry Art and Tom, but this is not about Arpeio. This is about the EVIDENCE.

No, it’s not about evidence, any more than James Fetzer’s Kennedy assassination literature or James Fetzer’s 9/11 truther bosh is about evidence. It’s about making something that’s banal into something rococo in the service of a thesis held a priori. It’s a self-aggrandizing exercise.

A foreign student at the University of Hawaii shags another student at the University of Hawaii. She gets pregnant. He marries her for reasons of his own (to keep the purveyors of his scholarship at bay, or to keep immigration authorities at bay, or to keep Stanley Dunham and anyone he might make a stink to at bay, or to keep from losing standing in front of Neil Abercrombie and others). The child is born six months later. A birth certificate is filled out at the hospital and an original copy tossed into the archives of the Hawaii Department of Health. Subsequent short-forms are generated in accordance with Hawaii law. A notice of the birth is placed in the Hawaii papers. She takes the child home for a month, moves to Seattle with the child for nine months, and returns to Honolulu where she lives for the next four years. The child’s sire decamps to Boston in June of 1962. Between that time and his death in 1982, he spends a grand total of five weeks in the same city with this the 3d of his 11 children.

That’s a straightforward, unedifying story.

In Sheriff Arpaio’s head, that’s ‘suspicious’, because anyone not a sucker knows it’s much more plausible that Barack Obama, Sr and Ann Dunham – two impecunious college students living off part time wage work, foundation stipends, and whatever Ann Dunham’s salesman father and escrow-account-maven mother would spare – undertook expensive and time-consuming international travel so BO, Sr. could introduce his pregnant paramour to his legal wife and to the father who’d told him by mail that his pregnant paramour was an unsuitable addition to the family, and so his pregnant paramour could avail herself of the benefits of obstetric medicine as practiced in small towns in Kenya. Kapiolani Hospital (or Stanley Dunham) sends a birth announcement to the Honolulu paper just to be cute.

Given certain structural impediments in all developed nations, I suspect some level of money printing should be permanent.

Perhaps finance $300 billion a year of federal spending just by printing (digitizing) money, or slowly paying off the national debt by printing money over the next 20 years.

…..

And on the birth certificates—-what makes you think it was not the second birth certificate that was faked, but not Obamas?

It’s easy. I get copy of Obama’s both certificate, then I cut out certain portions, and paste them into another blank certificate from the same era.

Then I point out the similarities. Oh, something is fishy! Woo-woo!

Jeez, these days anything can be photoshopped, and “experts” can be hired to carefully parse and make any statement.

Experts told us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was a “slam dunk,” said the CIA director. Thy had proof.

BTW, of all people, John “Warmonger” Bolton says the evidence hat Russians were involved in the DNC hacking is weak. He claims state agencies are sophisticated, and would leave no fingerprints. That is a sign of amateurs at work.

The truth is a many-splendored thing, so malleable, and shade-able. The power of omission is overwhelming.

Oh, my, the rehabilitation has begun. To remind readers, Sumner has been “unhinged” because Trump is an ignoramus but believes he is a genius. What could go wrong? I suspect that the rehabilitation is due to signals from Trump that he will leave domestic (economic) policy up to Paul Ryan and the other supply siders and devote his attention to foreign policy. Gee, what could go wrong?

When you don’t understand the reasons for why there are large pools of unemployed workers and idle resources, then you will continually find yourself living a world with repeated instances of where repeated money printing appears to the solution.

In short, when the cause is prior printing that throws coordination out of order, then the solution cannot be more printing.

But for you that is always all the time. Your day to day talk is “print print print”, which by the way targeting NGDP requires, but then when you are asked to justify the underlying principles and arguments, you fall back on these isolated instance type arguments. It is like you say every day people need a constant dose of fake news in order to be healthy and productive people, and then when you are asked to justify that claim, you say “Hey come on, this one time a guy was lied to about his healthy, and he ended up working his butt off and he built a house for his family because he thought he was going to die. So don’t tell me that lying shouldn’t be a core foundation of human communication.”

You need to think as an economist, which at the very least means in the longer term. Nobody is denying that misleading impressionable people may result in certain prone to abuse statistics like “jobs” to be affected. Sure, if you print counterfeit $100 bills in your basement, that may enable you to pay for the labor of a currently unemployed gardener who owns a currently “idle” hedge trimmer. But even if that were so, it was not your printing of the $100 that “created jobs”, it was your choice to not consume, but rather pay for labor, and also that action itself has to be included in whatever economic argument you are making, which must at the very least include counter factual reasoning. OK, sure, right at this second there is an employed gardener and idle hedge trimmer, and right at this second you printed money in your basement and then hired the gardener who uses the hedge trimmer.

But don’t fool yourself into believing that the above is in any way how it works in the real world. When the central banking system inflates, it is not the case that all the printing goes to unemployed workers and idle resources “first”, which somehow does not affect the prices or spending of other labor or capital, and thus serve as proof of a connection between printing money and historical labor hour statistics. It also affects the prices and spending of already utilized capital and labor.

Most importantly however, resources that are currently idle, are idle for reasons that printing money cannot be the solution in the long run, because that is the very cause for why you keep seeing large swaths of unemployed workers and idle resources.

The Fed cannot permanently solve the problems that are caused by its own existence.

Actually it is indeed about the evidence. It is the evidence that determines the truth in an empirical event such as this.

No, it is not about the evidence, because you haven’t the technical chops to evaluate what they’re saying. Neither does anyone but members of a tiny technical fraternity. You’re evaluating markers of their expertise if you evaluate anything at all. Who are these people and why should I pay them any mind?

You take a great deal on faith in this world. If you’ve encountered someone who is clinically paranoid, you’ve met someone who isn’t taking a great deal on the faith that comes from banal everyday experience and has substituted for it the issue of their imagination.

One of the more durable entertainment programs on the air is Forensic Files, which has been broadcasting for about 20 years. I suspect very few people view an episode while questioning the provenance of the expertise those interviewed have or whether their methods are valid. There’s a few reasons for that. One is that the program specializes in the sort of cases which go to a petit jury trial and there’s an attorney there whose professional standing depends on his talent for making the expert look dubious. Another is that there is seldom much situational irony in murder cases. Forensic evidence assists in nailing down a case against someone you’d find of interest as a matter of course. More rarely, it nails a lowlife whose capacity to commit the crime is not something that surprises the viewer or anyone else.

Here’s your problem, Major Freedom: you are employing a black box to try to persuade people who are not fundamentally silly to accept a silly thesis. The silly thesis in question incorporates one of two incongruities: that an apparatchik at Kapiolani Hospital sent a birth notice to the local newspaper for a baby not born there, or, if Kapiolani Hospital did not in that era do such a small-town thing as send birth notices to the paper (as my local community hospital used to) that Stanley Dunham from the 2d week of August in 1961 to his death in 1992 conjured and maintained a fiction that his grandson was born in Honolulu. Where the @#$% else would you expect the child of two Honolulu residents be born, and for what sort of whimsical reason would you pretend otherwise? His citizenship would not have been compromised had he been born abroad, as there weren’t any gaps in his mother’s residency in the United States and her American citizenship was solid. If Stanley Dunham were anxious on that point, putting a bogus birth notice in the Honolulu papers was an ineffectual way to address the problem, because Ann Dunham, her child, and anyone traveling with them would still have been logged when they re-entered the United States and quite possibly with consular officials where the child was born. Well, they might not have if they sneaked across the Rio Grande or used false documents. So, your scenario ends up being a bit of Ptolomaic cosmology – ever more rococo to make sense of things you can see.

Or are you going to bring up Frank Marshall Davis? If BO, Sr. was willing to pose as the sire of that man’s love child (to the point of traveling halfway around the world in 1971 to spend five weeks pretending to be his father), what would anyone else’s name be doing on the period long-form? Why would you need a forged replacement? Here we have another bit of Ptolemy: they must have had a fight and she puts FMD’s name on the forms in a fit of pique and…..

Here’s a simple explanation: it’s another episode in Sheriff Arpaio’s attention-whore life, and he’s recruited people to pose as ‘forensic document examiners’ for the benefit of a Youtube audience.

I hope you are joking about me as Fed chair. If not, I wonder if you also believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

I did not believe in miracles but then came 2016. You as FED chair in 2018 is actually way more realistic than the miracles that really happened in 2016. So yes, I won’t stop believing. [Song by Journey playing in head]. There’s a whole year left. So we are actually full on schedule.

“Actually it is indeed about the evidence. It is the evidence that determines the truth in an empirical event such as this.”

“No, it is not about the evidence”

Again, it is in fact about the evidence. Just because you are personally unable or unwilling to understand the techniques used to prove the document is a forgery, it doesn’t mean you are personally unable or unwilling to understand if you put the effort in.

You are conclusively rejecting the evidence on the basis of a reverse fallacy of authority, namely, that because you are not an authority on the subject, that this entitles you to judge the conclusion false.

Who are Forlabs you ask? Go out and research like I did.

Look, I am not saying that Obama was not born in Hawaii. He very well could have been born there. What matters is the evidence and the document the WH published. I am not so much interested in the motivations of people. They are irrelevant to the question of the evidence.

Did you watch the video within the video? The second link I posted? Even “normies” will be ale to understand it.

Finally, you are contradicting yourself. You are telling me to reject a particular conclusion on the basis of my lack of experience in the field of forensics and document analysis. Oh are making a larger claim that because I depend to some extent on the knowledge and experience of other people, that I am to conclusively deny X, and conclusively believe X. Yet what you want me to accept instead would ALSO according to your terms consist of the very same incomplete knowledge and dependency to some extent on other people’s knowledge and expertise. You don’t have personal experience in the creation of birth certificates, in Hawaii, in 1961, and there you are, a “believer”.

Your stupid and disgusting power struggle strategy, and that is exactly what it is, of propagandizing the irrational hatred of human intelligence, of telling people to question their own ability, to reject faith, and yet nevertheless are supposed to take what you say on what would have to be the very same faith according to your own gobbledygook, is I am sorry to say not going to work on me. If you attack my conclusions based on my nature as a human being who depends to a certain extent on the intelligence of others, is cutting the very ground on which you yourself stand. And now are wobbling. And now you are on her floor, flailing and wailing and a truth you cannot handle.

You are conclusively rejecting the evidence on the basis of a reverse fallacy of authority, namely, that because you are not an authority on the subject, that this entitles you to judge the conclusion fals

You’re accepting the authority not because you know anything about the techniques or the investigators, but because it tallies with something in your interiors.

Critics who’ve read the CV of one of the authorities cited note that his expert testimony is confined to state court trials and consists of offering assessments in graphology. Graphology is irrelevant to the contentions you’re making and Arpaio’s hobbyists are making, so why is Arpaio trotting this man out?

Dan Rather in 2004 put a graphologist on national television who admitted his expertise was in signature verification and, no, you could not do that with a photocopy. He then put a lapsed typewriter repairman on the air to demonstrate that you could manufacture a document similar to the one Col. Burkett gave his producer with a highly expensive typewriter of the sort IBM used to sell to printing and publishing firms. Given that the question at hand is why Col. Killian’s secretary produced a typescript in 1973 in Times Roman font identical to the default settings of Microsoft Word (and unaccountably making use of Army National Guard notations, as she remarked later), the man’s demonstration was irrelevant. Why was Dan Rather filling up his airtime with these two? He’s throwing chaff in people’s faces. And that’s what Arpaio and company are doing here.

Look, I am not saying that Obama was not born in Hawaii.

Oh, now you’re suggesting Obama has a valid long-form certificate sitting in the Health department’s archives but had his minions forge this one for sh*ts and giggles?

Your stupid and disgusting power struggle strategy,

Get out of the dayroom, take your thioridizine, and let one of the other patients use the bloody computer.

First I was taught contract econ briefly by the son of the current chair of the Fed, now it’s possible the next chair of the fed, one of the most powerful people in the world, could be the same person I’ve spent many hours of my life arguing over the internet with. Boggles the mind, and really causes me to reflect on who I am as a person: severely underemployed, prospects bleak.

“You are conclusively rejecting the evidence on the basis of a reverse fallacy of authority, namely, that because you are not an authority on the subject, that this entitles you to judge the conclusion false”

“You’re accepting the authority not because you know anything about the techniques or the investigators, but because it tallies with something in your interiors.”

You are conclusively rejecting the evidence on the basis of a reverse fallacy of authority, namely, that because you are not an authority on the subject, that this entitles you to judge the conclusion false.

“Critics who’ve read the CV of one of the authorities cited note that his expert testimony is confined to state court trials and consists of offering assessments in graphology. Graphology is irrelevant…”

You are accepting the authority not because you know anything about the critics or the techniques, but because it tallies with something in your interiors.

In fact, the skills and techniques behind graphology and document analysis are not dissimilar to what is needed to assess ANY document for authenticity.

You are attacking an expert, and conveniently leaving out Forlabs, which specializes in electronic document analysis. Guess you could not come up with some hollow ad hominem there.

“Oh, now you’re suggesting Obama has a valid long-form certificate sitting in the Health department’s archives but had his minions forge this one for sh*ts and giggles?”

Given this document has been proved a forgery, the motivation could be one of a number of reasons, which I do not care so much about right now. Perhaps the CIA forged it so that people would not know his real father and mother were radical communists. Perhaps he wasn’t actually born in the US. Or it could be something else. Whatever the reason, I don’t care. What I care about right now is that the document is a proven forgery. That is all I wanted to show.

All you have are silly excuses that undercut your own position on the matter.

…and who exactly are these “critics” you speak of regarding the relevance of graphology? What makes you qualified to have a credible judgment in the matter, given by your own principle you are not an expert?

A typewriter doesn’t type the same letter the same way twice. Every letter comes out differently because it is inked each time by a ribbon and the typist strikes the keys a bit differently.

The spacing between letters isn’t the same, either.

The typewriter does not type orthogonally to the paper’s edge. There is nothing in the typewriter to do this. Instead you have to align each page by eye. You typically do this for manuscripts whereby you pull both ends of the paper up and put them on top of one another. For a form like a birth certificate this would never be done.

The typewriter does not center the document. Again, this has to be done by eye and is even harder to do. If you’ve ever seen a typewritten manuscript you’ll notice that not a single page is perfectly centered. When filling a form each box is centered by hand! The video makes this point using the example of twins, thr documents of which were typed minutes apart. As you would see if you watched the video, the centering is all over the place.

Foosion, Trump craves popularity, which is why I don’t expect him to cut Social Security or Medicare. I do think he will increase the minimum wage, but not right away—before the next election. He’s a populist.

But I admit there’s a lot of uncertainty here, I’m just giving you my best guess.

Britonomist, I’m not qualified. I know myself much better than readers of my blog know me.

What if Kudlow or whoever said that you wouldn’t be required to do any technical administrative task you feel yourself unqualified for, i.e. you can delegate all that stuff to someone else at the Fed, and that your role was purely be to make decisions regarding rates/QE etc?

Britonomist, Fine, but that doesn’t describe Chair of the Fed, that’s a staff position advising the chair, or one of the other board members.

In any case, I think I can be more influential from this position.

Keep in mind that Larry Kudlow doesn’t get to decide the responsibilities of the Fed chair.

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Welcome to a new blog on the endlessly perplexing problem of monetary policy. You’ll quickly notice that I am not a natural blogger, yet I feel compelled by recent events to give it a shot. Read more...

Bio

My name is Scott Sumner and I have taught economics at Bentley University for the past 27 years. I earned a BA in economics at Wisconsin and a PhD at Chicago. My research has been in the field of monetary economics, particularly the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression. I had just begun research on the relationship between cultural values and neoliberal reforms, when I got pulled back into monetary economics by the current crisis.